General News

There will be a memorial service for the late Professor Erwin Marquit on Saturday, June 13, 2015 from 11:00 - 1:00 p.m. at the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis located at 900 Mount Curve Avenue.

Erwin Marquit died on February 19, 2015 at his home in Minneapolis, at the age of 88. Erwin was born in 1926 in New York City, and was an alumnus of City College. He lived in Poland as a refugee from McCarthyism from 1951-1963, where he received his doctorate in Physics from the University of Warsaw.

Upon his return to the U.S., he worked as a Research Associate at the University of Michigan. After an assistant professorship at the University of Colorado from 1965-1966, he joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota where he remained until his retirement in 1999.

His research was in experimental elementary particle physics. He was founder and editor of the Marxist Educational Press, which published over 35 books and the journal Nature, Society and Thought. In 1974 he ran for Governor of Minnesota on the Communist Party ticket. In the course of his career he worked at many prestigious institutions, including the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, The Humboldt University in Berlin and the Academy of Sciences in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where he had a long-term affiliation. He traveled the world with his wife of 46 years, Doris Greiser Marquit until her death May 2014.